Utah Statute of Limitations: A Civil Quick-Reference Guide (2026)

In Utah, the deadline to file a civil lawsuit depends on the claim. Personal injury and oral contracts run four years, written contracts six, property damage and fraud three, wrongful death two, defamation one, and actions on a judgment eight. Medical malpractice runs two years from discovery. Nearly every period lives in Title 78B, Chapter 2 of the Utah Code.

Below is the quick-reference table, each period linked to its exact current section, followed by the doctrines that move the clock: the discovery rule, tolling for minors, the borrowing statute, and the one-year notice deadline that quietly kills claims against the government.

This is informational, not legal advice. Limitations periods change, exceptions are common, and how a period applies to your facts is a legal judgment. Utah amended several of these sections as recently as the 2025 and 2026 legislative sessions. Verify every deadline against the linked Utah Code section — and, for anything that matters, against a licensed Utah attorney — before you rely on it.

Utah civil statute of limitations table

Every deadline in that table is a starting point, not a guarantee. The number that governs your case can shift based on when the claim accrued, who the defendant is, and whether the plaintiff was a minor. The rest of this guide walks through the parts that decide those questions.

How to read the table: accrual and the discovery rule

A limitations clock does not start when the wrong happens. It starts when the cause of action accrues. Utah's general rule, in Section 78B-2-102, is that civil actions must be commenced within the prescribed period "after the cause of action has accrued." For most claims, accrual is the moment of harm.

The discovery rule is the exception that changes everything, and Utah applies it unevenly. Two statutes build it in expressly:

• Fraud and mistake do not accrue "until the discovery by the aggrieved party of the facts constituting the fraud or mistake" (Section 78B-2-305). A three-year fraud claim can stay alive for years if the fraud stayed hidden.
• Medical malpractice runs from when the patient discovered or should have discovered the injury, subject to the outer cap discussed below.

Outside those statutory windows, Utah courts recognize a narrow common-law discovery rule, but it is not automatic and it is heavily fact-dependent. Whether it applies to a given claim is a case-law question, not a table lookup — the kind you answer by researching the controlling Utah authority, not by assuming the most generous reading. Assume the clock started at the moment of harm unless you can point to authority that says otherwise.

Contracts: four years or six

The single most common Utah limitations mistake is treating every contract the same. The period turns on one word: writing.

A claim on a contract, obligation, or liability "founded upon an instrument in writing" gets six years under Section 78B-2-309. An oral contract, an implied contract, or an open account for goods, work, or services gets four years under Section 78B-2-307 — measured from the last charge or the last payment received. A partly written, partly oral deal invites a fight over which statute controls, so paper matters.

Personal injury, wrongful death, and property damage

Utah has no statute that says "personal injury." General negligence — motor-vehicle collisions, premises liability, ordinary bodily-injury claims — falls into the four-year catch-all in Section 78B-2-307(4), which covers "relief not otherwise provided for by law." Four years is generous compared with most states, but it is not universal: malpractice and government claims below carry far shorter fuses.

Wrongful death is separate and shorter — two years for "recovery of damages for a death caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another" under Section 78B-2-304(2).

Property damage is three years under Section 78B-2-305, whether the target is real property (waste, trespass, or injury to land) or personal property (taking, detaining, or injuring goods). One trap: damage to a vehicle or personal property from a motor-vehicle accident is pulled out to four years by Section 78B-2-307(3). The same fender-bender can carry a three-year property clock in one scenario and four in another, so read the specific subsection.

Medical malpractice: two clocks at once

Medical malpractice runs on two clocks that expire independently, both set by Section 78B-3-404 of the Utah Health Care Malpractice Act:

• A two-year clock from when the plaintiff discovered, or through reasonable diligence should have discovered, the injury; and
• A four-year statute of repose measured from the act, omission, or occurrence itself — an absolute outer limit that can bar a claim before the plaintiff ever discovers the harm.

Two exceptions shorten the discovery window to one year: a foreign object wrongfully left in the body, and a provider's affirmative fraudulent concealment. Both run one year from discovery. And before filing, a claimant must serve a 90-day pre-suit notice of intent and go through a prelitigation panel review, which can toll the running period — procedural steps that are easy to overlook when a deadline is close.

Suing a Utah government entity: the one-year notice trap

This is the deadline that ends the most claims, because it arrives long before the ordinary limitations period would. The Governmental Immunity Act of Utah imposes a hard, separate step before you can sue any Utah state agency, county, city, school district, or their employees.

Under Section 63G-7-402, you must file a written notice of claim within one year after the claim arises. Miss it and the claim is barred — no matter that a private-defendant version of the same injury would have given you four years. After filing, the entity has 60 days to respond, and under Section 63G-7-403 you must commence the lawsuit within two years after the claim arose (and no sooner than 60 days after the notice). The notice content and delivery requirements in Section 63G-7-401 are strict. If a government entity is anywhere near your facts, calendar the one-year notice first and everything else second.

What moves the clock: tolling and the borrowing statute

A few doctrines pause or import a limitations period. The most important:

• Minority and incapacity. Under Section 78B-2-108, the limitations period does not run while a person is under 18 or mentally incompetent without a legal guardian — except in actions to recover real property. The clock begins once the disability is removed. Note that government claims have their own timing rules, so this tolling is not universal.
• The borrowing statute. Section 78B-2-103 provides that a cause of action arising in another jurisdiction that is already time-barred there "may not be pursued in this state," unless a Utah citizen has held the claim since it accrued. You cannot revive a stale out-of-state claim by filing it in Utah.

There are more — absence from the state, the death of a party, a prior action that failed other than on the merits — each with its own section in Title 78B, Chapter 2, Part 1. When a deadline is close, read the whole part; the provision that saves or sinks a claim is often not the one you started with.

Why "verify against the current section" is not boilerplate

Statutes of limitations are amended more often than practitioners expect. In the 2025 and 2026 sessions alone, Utah amended the eight-year judgment provision, the three-year property-and-fraud provision, and the government notice-of-claim procedure. A number reprinted in a 2019 blog post — or confidently produced by a general-purpose AI chatbot working from stale training data — can be a year off and a malpractice claim in the making. The safe habit is the one this guide follows: pin every deadline to its live Utah Code section and read the current text.

That grounding discipline is the whole design of legal-research tools worth using. CaseRead answers limitations questions from the current Utah Code and links every citation back to the statute it came from, so you read the section rather than trust a paraphrase — and if a period can't be tied to a live source, it gets flagged, not asserted. Once you have the deadline, the next step is confirming how Utah courts have applied it, which is where searching Utah case law picks up. And if you use any AI in that workflow, do it within the ethics guardrails Utah expects of its lawyers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the statute of limitations for personal injury in Utah? Four years. Utah has no separate "personal injury" statute; general negligence claims — car crashes, slip-and-falls, most bodily-injury cases — fall under the catch-all in Utah Code Section 78B-2-307(4), which sets four years for relief not otherwise provided for by law. The clock usually starts on the date of injury. Medical malpractice and claims against government entities have shorter, separate deadlines.

What is the statute of limitations for a contract in Utah? It depends on whether the contract is written. A claim on a contract founded upon an instrument in writing has six years under Utah Code Section 78B-2-309. An oral or otherwise unwritten contract, and open accounts for goods or services, get four years under Section 78B-2-307. The period generally runs from the breach or from the last payment or charge on the account.

What is the deadline to sue for medical malpractice in Utah? Two years from when the patient discovers, or reasonably should have discovered, the injury — but never more than four years after the act itself, under Utah Code Section 78B-3-404. A wrongfully left foreign object or a provider's fraudulent concealment gives one year from discovery. A pre-suit notice of intent and a prelitigation panel review are also required and can toll the clock.

How long do I have to file a claim against a Utah city or government? Two deadlines. First, you must file a written notice of claim within one year after the claim arises, under Utah Code Section 63G-7-402 — miss it and the claim is barred. After the entity has 60 days to respond, you must commence the lawsuit within two years of when the claim arose, under Section 63G-7-403. The one-year notice is the deadline that catches people.

Does the discovery rule apply to Utah statutes of limitations? Sometimes. Utah's fraud and mistake statute does not begin to run until the aggrieved party discovers the facts, under Utah Code Section 78B-2-305, and medical malpractice runs from discovery of the injury. For many other claims the clock starts at accrual — usually when the harm occurs — and Utah courts apply a common-law discovery rule only in limited circumstances. Do not assume it applies.

Does the statute of limitations pause for minors in Utah? Yes. Under Utah Code Section 78B-2-108, the limitations period does not run while a person is under 18 or mentally incompetent without a legal guardian, except in actions to recover real property. Once the disability is removed — the person turns 18 or regains competence — the normal period begins. Claims against government entities have their own rules, so the tolling is not universal.

Before you calendar a deadline

The controlling number depends on accrual, tolling, the defendant's identity, and amendments that land every legislative session — so confirm the current statute before you rely on any date here, and whatever tool you use to find it, verify what it tells you. Paste any AI-drafted research or citation into CaseRead's Hallucination Shield and it checks each citation it finds (up to 25 per run) for existence and support against real sources, free — the two-minute check that keeps a hallucinated section number out of your calendar and your filings. When you're ready to run statute-current Utah research grounded in the live Code, CaseRead's free tier is built for exactly that.